Could an AI jury replace human jurors? UNC School of Law just ran a simulated trial with AI models.

UNC School of Law ran a simulated criminal trial on October 24, 2025 to see how AI “jurors” would perform. Law students acted as the prosecutors, defense, and witnesses in a case about a teenager, “Henry Justus,” accused of participating in an unarmed robbery; the scenario was based on a real case the organizer, Prof. Joseph Kennedy, handled years ago.

Three AI models—ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude—were asked to evaluate the evidence and render a verdict. They found the defendant not guilty. Kennedy said the models were strikingly attentive to the legal standards and key facts, and he noted that some judges already use AI for tasks like bail and sentencing support, which made this experiment a logical next step.

Other faculty were more skeptical: Prof. Eric Muller pointed out the AIs cannot read human cues such as body language, and Prof. Eisha Jain said the exercise felt divorced from the human gravity of deciding someone’s liberty.

No courts are proposing AI juries; if anything, Kennedy suggested the near-term use case might be in complex civil disputes or ADR, where fast processing and summarizing large records could be valuable